To Work We Go

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Harmanjit Singh and Keetha Mock would seem to have just about nothing in common. Singh, 25, is a bachelor, a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and a computer programmer for Lucent Technologies in California's Silicon Valley. Mock, 39, is a divorced mother of three in Pontiac, Mich., and a former welfare client who until last Christmas had never worked steadily. But in their diversity, they exemplify one reason for the amazing length and strength of the U.S. boom. Despite all the recent gyrations in the stock market, the longest economic expansion in U.S. history has not only created incredible numbers of new jobs but also brought into the labor force the most varied sorts of new workers to fill those jobs and keep the economy humming.

For the past two years or so, experts, beginning with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, have proclaimed the ability of labor supply to meet job demand to be impossible. There would not be enough workers available, they warned, to keep growth at the blistering pace of the late 1990s. To maintain output, employers would be forced to swipe workers from one another by bidding up wages. So inflation would rise as production slowed down. In effect, goodbye to the golden days.

Yet the economy has rolled merrily along, doing what supposedly could not be done. True, a sudden March flare-up in consumer prices--far larger than could be blamed on gas-pump inflation--indicated that labor costs may at last be starting a troublesome rise. Yet employment figures for the same month make it clear that the U.S. is a long way from running out of workers. Somewhere, somehow, employers found 416,000 people to add to payrolls in March, the most for any month in four years. Even after subtracting temporary Census hiring and adjusting for seasonal quirks, job gains continued the hot--some had thought unsustainable--pace of 1999. And it was not done by putting the officially unemployed back to work. The jobless rate--4.1% in March--has barely moved since September 1999, when it was 4.2%.

Obviously, the hot economy has prompted many people who had not thought of taking a job to look for one, and caused bosses to search for employees among men and women who had not traditionally been counted in the U.S. labor pool. Who are these people? Herewith a sampler:

IMMIGRANTS Silicon Valley and other high-tech employers are bringing into the U.S. 115,000 computer programmers, engineers, scientists and the like each year under H1-B visas (these allow people with special skills that the economy needs to enter the U.S. outside regular immigration quotas). But employers insist they need more, and bills are moving through Congress to raise the limit to as many as 195,000. Among others, roughly half of all recent alumni of the six-campus Indian Institute of Technology are said to be working in the U.S., including Harmanjit Singh and about 24 others from the New Delhi campus' 40-strong graduating class of 1997. "Nowadays start-up companies are visiting the I.I.T. campuses to recruit people," says Singh. "They lure them with stock options. They know that Indians are willing to work hard for an amount of money that may seem small to Americans but is unheard of in India." Singh was headhunted by a consulting company that got his name from a friend already in the U.S. "They phoned me, and after a 20-minute interview they sent me the paperwork for a visa," he says.

Less skilled immigrants are filling so many of the jobs that Americans traditionally disdain--dishwasher, gardener, construction day laborer, house cleaner, nanny--that portions of the economy have become heavily dependent on them. Restaurants alone employ 1.4 million immigrants, who make up almost 14% of all their workers. Christina Howard, senior legislative representative of the National Restaurant Association, says eateries will need to add 2 million more jobs by 2010, and "we are absolutely looking to immigration" to help meet that goal.

The AFL-CIO has done a complete about-face on immigrants, from fearing them as low-wage rivals of American workers to viewing them as potential union members. The labor federation is even whooping up support for a legislative amnesty that would lift the fear of deportation from the estimated 6 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has virtually stopped raiding businesses to look for undocumented workers. "It is much easier to find work now than ever before," says Josefina Diaz, a native of the Dominican Republic who cleans offices in midtown Manhattan. "It doesn't matter if you have a green card or not."

WOMEN The trend for growing numbers of females to work outside the home has been going on for decades, of course. But new recruits are still entering, or re-entering, the labor force. They include Keetha Mock and some 10,000 others helped by Kelly Services to come off the welfare rolls.

Mock, who grew up in a welfare home, had struggled for 17 years to support her family with no child support from her divorced husband. She had held a variety of short-lived jobs and had collected welfare for periods that added up to eight years. By last October, she had just about given up hope of employment, partly because she had not developed any skills in the 20 years since her high school graduation. After Oakland Community College contacted her for a training program it runs with Kelly Services, she missed her first interview, telling herself, "This ain't going to happen." A counselor, however, rescheduled the appointment and even drove Mock to it. The week before Christmas, Mock was hired as an administrative assistant at a General Motors truck plant in Pontiac, answering phones, setting up meetings and handling other secretarial duties. With fringe benefits, which she had never got before, she earns about three times as much as she did in any previous job. Two sons, high school dropouts who Mock says had been "just laying around the house," have been inspired by their mother's success to snare jobs themselves. James, 19, is a porter at an Oldsmobile dealership, and Nathan, 18, is an apprentice cook at a restaurant.

Kathleen Shelby, a partner in FlexTime Solutions, a Maplewood, N.J., staffing firm that supplies interim workers in marketing, public relations and communications to corporations, reports considerable success in placing women who have been out of the work force for as long as 10 years. Most, she says, are mothers who dropped out because they could not put in the 50-hour week many companies now demand of full-timers, but are happy to work for shorter periods.

Younger mothers, some analysts say, are returning to work sooner after giving birth--though few as quickly as Chicagoan Gina Johnson, 18. Only two weeks after her second baby was born last May, she returned to her job as shift manager in a fast-food restaurant, and she later landed higher-paying employment as manager of a card shop. Family members urged her to take more time off, says Johnson, who is single and engaged. But she told them, "I don't want anybody taking care of me." She gets baby-sitting help from the Daycare Action Council of Illinois but now can pay $30 a month of that herself.

THE YOUNG AND OLD Students have been holding down part-time jobs since education ceased to be a monopoly of the leisure classes, but employers are finding ways to get more of them to participate in the labor-short economy. For instance, United Parcel Service has an Earn and Learn program that offers part-timers an unusual benefit--student loans and tuition assistance. More than 8,000 students are currently enrolled in the program.

Several officials of A.A.R.P. and of employment agencies say they are finding work for more and more people over 55, though some of the prospects say this is true only for those with technological backgrounds. But the just enacted law that allows Social Security pensioners ages 65 to 69 to earn unlimited amounts without loss of benefits ought to prompt more seniors to work, or to work longer.

Carl Camden, executive vice president, field operations, sales and marketing for Kelly Services, reports that "a fair number" of the temps Kelly supplies to employers are in their 60s, and "these are some of the most productive workers we have." But, he observes, before the law was changed, many of them would "ask us to keep very specific checks on how much money they earned"--and would stop working as soon as they hit the point at which they would begin to lose Social Security benefits.

For employers, finding and hiring new workers is often neither easy nor cheap. The Home Shopping Network has attracted an effective if eclectic mix of seniors, middle-aged women of all races, and teenagers to answer the 160,000 calls that pour in daily to its center in St. Petersburg, Fla. But new management had to turn the company upside down to do it.

To begin with, HSN spent $6 million renovating facilities at the 59-acre campus, including the employee cafeteria. It set up a program with a local high school that is expected to give 30 to 50 students part-time jobs at the call center, and figures at least some will stay with HSN after they graduate. It is pushing flextime to the max. It already offered some 40 different full-time or part-time schedules, and now it is starting a pilot program that will allow employees to draw up their own schedules around a core of required hours. Lisa Letizio, senior vice president of human resources, thinks this will be especially attractive to mothers who want to put in fewer hours while their children are small, gradually working longer hours.

Then there's money. In January, HSN raised starting pay from $6 an hour to $7, and later this year it will offer health insurance to all its workers, including the 40% who are part-time. That is an unusual but no longer unheard-of deal. There are reports of some fast-food restaurants also extending benefits to workers, including part-timers, who did not get them before. And wage hikes are cropping up in other places. Tony Vallone, owner of six upscale restaurants in Houston, was paying only minimum wage to his dishwashers and kitchen-prep workers 18 months ago. Now the dishwashers get an extra $2 an hour and the prep people $3 extra--and they all share in a 401(k) investment plan that was formerly limited to higher-paid workers.

So far, such reports are too sketchy to prove that the long-dreaded bidding war on wages has begun. But they do indicate that employers will have to push harder than ever to raise productivity to offset the wage and benefit increases they will be forced to grant. The vastly underrated American work ethic that prompts the most oddly assorted people to snap up jobs when offered a chance has kept the boom boiling longer than anyone expected. But from now on, putting them on the payroll is less likely to be as cheap.

--Reported by Valerie Marchant and Elaine Rivera/New York, Matt Baron/Chicago, Helen Pitt/San Francisco, Deborah Fowler/Houston and Dee Gill/Tampa

With reporting by Valerie Marchant and Elaine Rivera/New York, Matt Baron/Chicago, Helen Pitt/San Francisco, Deborah Fowler/Houston and Dee Gill/Tampa